Chase Read Free

this.
    ‘Let's go,’ she said. She opened her door and stepped out, her lovely, trim legs flashing in a rustle of brief cloth.
     
    The door of the small grey room opened, admitting an equally small and grey man. His face was lined, his eyes sunken as if he had not had any sleep in a day or two. His light brown hair was uncombed and in need of a trim. He crossed to the table behind which Chase and the girl sat, took the only chair left and folded into it as if he would never get up again. He said, ‘I'm Detective Wallace.’
    ‘Glad to meet you,’ Chase said, though he was not glad at all.
    The girl was quiet, looking at her nails.
    ‘Now, what's this all about?’ Wallace asked, folding his hands on the top of the scarred table and looking at each of them, much like a priest or counsellor.
    ‘I already told the desk sergeant most of it,’ Chase said.
    ‘He isn't in homicide. I am,’ Wallace said. ‘Who was murdered and how?’
    Chase said, ‘Her boyfriend, stabbed.’
    ‘Can't she speak?’
    ‘I can speak,’ the girl said.
    ‘What's your name?’
    ‘Louise.’
    ‘Louise what?’
    ‘Allenby. Louise Allenby,’ she said.
    Wallace said, ‘You live in the city?’
    ‘In Ashside.’
    ‘How old?’
    She looked at him as if she would flare up, then turned her gaze back at her nails again. ‘Seventeen.’
    ‘In high school?’
    ‘I graduated in June,’ she said. ‘I'm going to college in the fall, to Penn State.’
    Wallace said. ‘Who was the boy?’
    ‘Mike. Michael Karnes.’
    ‘Just a boyfriend, or you engaged?’
    ‘Boyfriend,’ she said. ‘We'd been going together for about a year, kind of steady.’
    ‘What were you doing on Kanackaway Ridge Road?’ Wallace asked.
    She looked at him, levelly this time. ‘What do you think?’
    ‘Look,’ Chase interjected, ‘is this really necessary? The girl wasn't involved in it. I think the man with the knife might have tried for her next if I - hadn't stopped him.’
    Wallace turned more toward Chase. He said, ‘How'd you happen to be there in the first place?’
    ‘Just out driving,’ Chase said.
    Wallace looked at him a long moment, then said, ‘What's your name?’
    ‘Benjamin Chase.’
    ‘I thought I'd seen you before,’ the detective said. His manner softened immediately. ‘Your picture was in the papers today.’
    Chase nodded.
    ‘That-was really something you did over there,’ Wallace said. ‘That really took guts.’
    ‘It wasn't as much as they make out,’ Chase said.
    ‘I'll bet it wasn't!’ Wallace said, though it was clear that he thought it must even have been more than the papers had made it. He turned to the girl, who had taken a new interest in Chase, studying him from the corners of her eyes. His tone toward her had changed too. He said, ‘You want to tell me about it, just how it happened?’
    She did, losing some of her composure in the process. Twice Chase thought that she was going to cry, and he wished that she would have. Her cold manner, so soon afterward, made him uneasy. Maybe she was still trying to deny the existence of death. She held the tears back, and by the time she had finished she was herself again.
    ‘You saw his face?’ Wallace asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Can you describe him?’
    ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘He had brown eyes, I think.’
    ‘No moustache or beard?’
    ‘I don't think so.’
    ‘Long sideburns or short?’
    ‘Short, I think.’
    ‘Any scars?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Anything at all memorable about him, the shape of his face, whether his hair was receding or full, anything?’
    ‘I can't remember,’ she said.
    Chase said, ‘When I got to her, she was in a state of shock. I doubt that she was seeing anything and registering it properly.’
    Instead of a grateful agreement, Louise turned an angry look at him. He remembered, too late, that the worst thing for someone Louise's age was to lose your cool, to fail to cope. He had betrayed her momentary lapse to, of all people, a policeman.